Thursday, December 6, 2007

With this being the biggest World Championships ever, we had a wealth of Standard decks to enjoy, and it's interesting to see how the best in the game chose to attack the format, given the limited information they had from States / Champs, Grand Prix–Krakow, and a handful of tournaments since.

As looked likely from the info from the traders first thing in the morning, Red-Green Big Mana was the most popular deck, looking to play some colossal threats earlier than really seems fair. A few players, including the newly enshrined Hall of Fame member Kai Budde, chose to add an extra color on occasion, but essentially this was the deck looking to make big monsters and swing.

The most popular tribe of the day was Faeries, in both blue-green and blue-black incarnations. The latter was the deck of choice for Zvi Mowshowitz, who finished the standard happy on 4-1. The other popular choice was Elves, who were particularly well liked by the Japanese contingent, including Kenji Tsumura.

From a control angle, Makeshift Mannequin decks led the way, but there were green-black Rock decks and variations on classic blue control, be it Pickles lock or Guile-powered counterspell heavy control.

After this, there were a whole mess of decks that showed up in smaller numbers. These included the Rites of Flourishing deck, Wild Pair, mono-black beatdown, and a mono-green Stompy deck featuring all the hasty monsters a boy could ever want. One of the more exciting new decks included in here was the deck designed by Masashiro Kuroda and run by three Japanese players including Tsuyoshi Fujita, sporting Thousand-Year Elixir, Mangara of Corondor and Immaculate Magistrates. Billy Moreno chose to play a Gro deck, striking his own path with the combined threats of Tarmogoyf and Quirion Dryad. Akira Asahara, meanwhile, was playing Reanimator to get his discounted massive monsters by way of the graveyard. There were 27 of these assorted decks, enough to keep the field on its toes for Day 1.